The Conscience of Our Society

‘All are Responsible for All’

Another norm-shattering and authoritarianism-foreboding event occurred when Columbia University allowed the New York Police Department (NYPD) to enter its grounds and to engage in mass arrests.  Many of the more than 100 students who were arrested are being punished in other ways: Columbia said that their ID’s would stop working, and some of them would be barred from finishing the semester.

It does not matter what they were protesting about.  Student protests can sometimes be seen as the conscience of a society.  They represent the height of analytic thought, unconflicted action, untainted desire for good, and the zeal of youth.  Especially in our day when the influence of corruption far exceeds the benefits of experience, their fresh voices are important.  It has also been why, while teaching at Yale College and briefly at Columbia, I believed in protecting the academic freedom of students as much as that of professors.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which spoke up on my behalf when Yale terminated me for my public speech, has released a cogent joint statement through the Barnard and Columbia Chapters (I reproduce it here in full, as it has received too little coverage):

The American Association of University Professors has defined two central pillars of higher education in America: academic freedom and shared governance: the freedom to teach and do research without interference from entities external to the profession; and the “inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students.”  In the last three days, Columbia University President Shafik and her administration have seriously violated both.  We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs.  She has demonstrated flagrant disregard of shared governance in her acceptance of partisan charges that anti-war demonstrators are violent and antisemitic and in her unilateral and wildly disproportionate punishment of peacefully protesting students.

President Shafik’s testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee on April 17 has profoundly disturbed us.  In the face of slanderous assaults on Columbia faculty and students and of gross interference in academic practices by Congressional inquisitors, President Shafik not only did not object—she capitulated to their demands.  Academic freedom was formulated from its very beginning to safeguard faculty from political or other non-academic sources of intrusion.  President Shafik, the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees, and the former Dean of the Law School allowed this freedom for Columbia faculty to be publicly shredded.  They effectively pledged, on the Congressional record, to end academic freedom at Columbia.

President Shafik’s decision on April 18 to call upon the New York Police Department to arrest over one hundred students for engaging in a peaceful protest is a grotesque violation of norms of shared governance.  Section 444 of University Statutes, put in place after the police attacks of 1968, requires “consultation” with the University Senate executive committee before anything so drastic as yesterday’s attack would be permitted.  President Shafik’s administration did not consult; they informed the committee of its decision.  “The Executive Committee did not approve the presence of NYPD on campus,” said the Executive Committee Chair, adding that the Committee came to their decision “unequivocally.”  President Shafik’s decision to invite the NYPD to campus was thus undertaken unilaterally, disregarding the very idea of shared governance.

In Wednesday’s hearing, President Shafik repeatedly claimed that she was inaugurating a new era at Columbia.  Her actions thus far suggest that this era will be one of repressed speech, political restrictions on academic inquiry, and punitive discipline against the University’s own students and faculty.  As the protesters’ chant rightly states, “Protest is democracy; this is a travesty!”  AAUP Barnard and Columbia pledge continued support for our students’ right to protest and to speak freely, and for our colleagues’ right to teach and to write freely within their domains of expertise.  We have lost confidence in our president and administration, and we pledge to fight to reclaim our university.

In times of authoritarianism, academic and journalistic institutions are the first to be targeted, as they provide powerful grounding in truth that authoritarian methods of threat, intimidation, propaganda, and coercion cannot match.  This is why I have called myself a “barometer of our times,” when Yale dismissed me after seventeen years without due process, a mere two years after affirming my right to free speech, in embarrassing obsequiousness to Alan Dershowitz’s pressures (my chair, John Krystal, insinuated at our last meeting: “Don’t you know what the official line is, what you are supposed to say?” as he himself repeated it, regardless of its lack of merit).

I also experienced the corruption of the judicial system, as I watched the judge ruling in my favor be replaced and the replacement judge be promptly promoted upon dismissing my case.  Even the appeals process was dysfunctional in leaving out my key claim while permitting Yale, an academic institution, to argue that it had “no obligation” to academic freedom.  The top Constitutional scholars of the country were watching closely, stating I had an “excellent case,” but it did not even have a chance to go to trial: the decision was made in advance that the discovery, which would expose all the ways in which political and financial interests compromise academic freedom, would be too costly.

I have felt solidarity with a group of Yale students calling themselves Yale Hunger Strikers for Palestine.  They had written a letter to the University president, Peter Salovey, calling for Yale’s commitment to divest from weapons manufacturing companies that are potentially supplying the Israeli military.  The war has so far killed more than 34,000 civilians, 70 percent of them women and children, alongside the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded in history, according to the Integrated Food Security Classification system.  “Our heads are spinning….  [But] this is absolutely nothing compared with what is being inflicted upon the people of Gaza,” one of the hunger-striking students said.  Their letter went unanswered, even as they were on their seventh day of fasting as of Friday.  As a physician, I have ingrained in me medical neutrality, which bars political or ideological matters from entering into medical decision making.  Indeed, the medical paradigm has made my sole allegiance life, against death.  Perhaps we can soon learn from these students that humanity is one, that there is no “Never Again” without “Never Again for Everyone,” and that for all of us to survive, we must take to heart Father’s Zosima’s admonition that all must be responsible for all.